A social history of disability in the Middle Ages: cultural considerations of physical impairment

What was it like to be physically disabled in the Middle Ages? Some archetypes immediately spring to mind: the blind beggar rattling a tin cup while shouting ‘Alms for the poor!’; the shrouded leprous figure shuffling through the streets; the peg-legged sailor reminiscing about his days on the sea; the hunchback; the mute; and so on. In A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages, Irina Metzler interrogates the social institutions and cultural attitudes surrounding these and other characters, revealing the extent to which disability was ubiquitous in medieval life and consequently deeply engrained in collective mentalities and social attitudes. Metzler argues that medieval people with disabilities occupied a liminal space in medieval culture, stuck between stages of health, illness and death such that their humanity and social standing were considered debatable. Hence, disabled people were a kind of ‘cultural wild card, removed from one status, but not yet inhabiting another, and opening the possibility of any outcome’ (7).

Metzler’s previous book, Disability in Medieval Europe, considered the philosophical, theological, and theoretical framework of disability in medieval society. Published as part of Routledge’s series in Cultural History, A Social History of Disability delves more deeply into the lived experience of disability in the Middle Ages. Crisply organized into four thematic chapters on law, work, ageing and charity, she manages to extrapolate a broad yet rigorous overview of the cultural experience of disability. An evocative and wincing description of ‘judicial mutilations’ and other forms of corporeal punishment enable readers to learn about the social effect of the legally inscribed body and the legal origins of the cultural association between disability and criminality. Through analysis of work-related injuries, compensation, and fraternal benefits, Metzler considers the working body and the experience of disability in pre-industrial and proto-industrial society. She also analyses the voluminous philosophical, religious and scientific literature on ageing in medieval society through an analysis of various case studies of physically disabled peasants, churchmen and women, nobles and rulers. Finally, Metzler considers the changing legal, occupational and cultural paradigms of charity, finding that charitable giving played a crucial role defining and categorizing impoverished people with physical impairments.

The temporal focus of the book spans the breadth of the early, high and late medieval period, with the briefest of forays into early modernism in order to trace the development of proto-institutional social welfare systems. Metzler employs a synchronic and diachronic approach in her discussion of these topics to capture historical references to disabled people while situating them within a contemporary understanding of disability (4). Indeed, she finds that the very variety of terms used to identify disability reflects upon the degree to which medieval people distinguished between different people with physical impairments. Her sources include legal documents, common and canon law, court proceedings, hagiographical texts, scientific and medical texts, official and private correspondence, and published allegories. As a social and cultural history, she seeks to interpret attitudes and experiences from these sources and does so effectively with heavy referencing to specific occurrences in the historical record.

It is here we are treated to curious, and often tragic, snapshots of actual people, including the epileptic mother who accidentally casts her nursing infant into the fire during a seizure (48); the adult man forced to prove to the courts that his cropped ears were not the result of judicial punishment, but the result of a childhood attack by a hungry pig (31); and the ‘blind and lame’ beggars compelled to establish charitable associations to distinguish themselves from rampant deceit by others pretending to be disabled (179). Metzler’s narrative is jammed with additional scenarios, some of which she unpacks and others she considers self-explanatory. This method of conveying short summaries of separate cases in rapid succession demonstrates the rigour of her research, but is sometimes rather disjointed and inconsistent. Readers are sometimes left wondering why a light interpretive hand was applied in some parts (such as the chapter on law) and not in others (such as the much denser chapter on ageing). Her approach is probably partly a reflection of the source material she uses, particularly hagiographical and allegorical texts where such stories of individual calamity often represent meditations on religious principles and immorality. This approach may also be reflective of Metzler’s daunting objective to reconstruct the ‘social and cultural history of groups previously deemed historically invisible’ (3). Nevertheless, by stitching these sources together and stepping back slightly, it becomes clearer that her use of numerous snapshots form a larger portrait of the lived experience of disability in the Middle Ages.

It is both understandable and puzzling that Metzler confines herself to a discussion of physical impairment, excluding ‘mental illness’ and other broadly defined mental health issues from the narrative. Understandable, because the separation of mind and body would probably have been evident not only in the nature of the sources used but also in the conceptual terms of her study, which focuses on cultural responses to disabled bodies. It is, however, puzzling that mental health is not examined in equal measure to physical impairment. Mental health does crop up throughout the study – the psychocultural fear of senility, madness, and other mental ‘afflictions’ – but it is not considered in as much depth as the legal, working and aging body, and nor is there a discussion of the justification for focusing principally on physical impairment. It is surprising, for example, that head (read: brain) injury does not figure more prominently as it was probably ubiquitous in medieval society, with only brief reference to a man who fell, hit his head and subsequently murdered his wife (47). A synchronic analysis of the sources would have helped break down binary distinctions between physical and mental disability and perhaps lead into fruitful analysis of cultural responses to both spheres of the human experience.

A Social History of Disability is a convincing survey of the lived experience of physical disability in the Middle Ages. Metzler has produced a tightly organized, well-written and thoroughly researched contribution to disability history, not to mention histories of law, labour, age, and social welfare. Readers will certainly have a better understanding of what it was like to live with a disability in the medieval period and hopefully take away a greater appreciation of the ways in which a critical disability history approach is capable of revealing entire populations of people formerly overlooked in the historiography of the period. Metzler has indeed demonstrated that medieval disabled people were ‘everywhere’ (2), inviting further research into the ways in which disability was an essential thread in the historical record.

Dustin Galer
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
[email protected]
© 2014, Dustin Galer
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2013.856677